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XL Deploy’s tagging mechanism provides a handy way to control the automated mapping of deployable object to their containers. When your environment has multiple containers of a particular type, and multiple deployables that can map to them, XL Deploy will perform a deployment for each possible mapping. A good example is this: you have two jee.War files in your deployment package, and two GlassFish domains in your environment. This will result in a deployment plan of four steps, as each WAR file is deployed to each domain.

But if you intended that WAR “A” should go to domain1 and WAR “B” should go to domain2, then this is the perfect use case for tagging. Simply place a tag on each deployable and container, and then the artifacts will be deployed accordingly. A tag is nothing more than a text string: “A” and “B” would be perfectly functional in this respect, but of course you’d want something more descriptive. Wildcarding is also possible.

Within the XL Deploy GUI, tags are a set of strings under the “Deployment” tab on a container or a deployable. Inside the deployment manifest, tags appear as a series of values in this fashion:

Tagging also comes in handy when working with xl-rules to contribute additional steps to your deployment.
Let’s use a simple example: we’re deploying a cmd.Command script object to two hosts in same environment, and we want to have xl-rules contribute a second script to only one of the hosts. Our hosts here are WAS85ND-host and WAS85SA-host.

Dave Roberts is a Senior Technical Consultant for XebiaLabs. He has worked on both sides of DevOps, as a web software engineer and as a WAS/DB2 administrator.

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